Party Line: A party line (multiparty line, shared service line, party wire) is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers.
Helen Parch is working on her preserves, eating what she can and canning what she can’t when the party line rings 3 times. She surreptitiously picks up the receiver in the way the TV people always seem to think does not make a click on the other end. Helen loves to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.
She overhears a scintillating conversation between Betty and Emma about the market’s egregious lack of nectarines, Bingo games, and the awful hat worn by that wet blanket Helen. Hey, that’s her! Betty says the older Helen gets, the worse she gets. They describe Helen as being boring, telling the same stories over and over. Helen is being set up as the bad gal here, but honestly was there ever a time when all three of these women would not have been considered dullards?
OK, maybe the Far Side style glasses were stylish at the time. And I’m sure women then were often trapped in lives that were not so exciting. But these ladies make The View look like the Algonquin Roundtable. The scary part is that these old bitties average under 50 years old which is seeming younger and younger to me. And where are the men? Helen is described as a spinster, [1] but I assume the other two buried their husbands.
Detective Atkins drops by to ask if Helen remembers a man named Heywood Miller. Curiously she does not ask how he ended up with two such lumbercentric names — no wonder she’s a spinster. Why yes, she does recall him as “That awful man . . . a fool, a gambler, and heaven knows what else.” She thinks back 8 or 9 years to just after he and Mrs. Miller moved to the community . . . . . .
Helen and Gertrude, who Helen apparently talked to death in the intervening years, are yakking on the party line. And Helen is using the exact same phone in 1951. Yeah, they were attached to the wall, but you didn’t have to buy a new one every three years and they would survive a nuclear blast. When the topic turns to how many eggs to use in a cake, a man interrupts, “For Pete’s sake, are you two still on the phone?” He chews them out for monopolizing the line for hours while he has an important business call to make.
Helen tells him patience is a virtue. She gets pouty and grudgingly tells Gertrude that she will call her back later. She hangs up the phone, but just has to pick it up again to snoop on Miller’s call. She overhears him placing bets with his bookie.
In the grocery store the next day, Helen overhears the clerk address Mr. Miller. She confronts him about interrupting her conversation yesterday. She smirks and tells him she hopes his horses won. He tells her to mind her own business.
Later, while telling the famous story of her back-to-back Bingo wins that would be in her repertoire’s rotation for the next 9 years, Miller interrupts them again. This time he says he needs to call a doctor for his wife. Helen tells Gertrude to stay on the line, that they are wise to his tricks. Naturally, his wife dies.
Detective Atkins says Miller moved back to the city. He returned to a life of crime and ended up in jail. And he has just escaped. He says Miller “might be heading this way. To kill you, Mrs. Parch.” That finally gets the old shrew’s attention.
The story has set us up to root for the killer. Psycho, which would be released the same year, manipulated us to empathize with killer Norman Bates. This episode takes the opposite approach, and conditions us to dislike the victim. Helen is just a loathsome, self-absorbed nothing who caused a woman’s death. It is understandable that she does not rate much sympathy.
But we are expected to care enough about her for the lengthy scene of her securing her home to be suspenseful. Any other show, I would think it was just sloppy to have her be so unsympathetic, but they count on our concern to create suspense.
Either by design or by their usual professionalism, they pull it off. We might be worried that Miller will get in, but I think we are also a little bit happy that he does.
Two motifs help contribute to the excellence of the episode. First, the images of the ladies on the phone are fantastic. As Helen eavesdrops or Miller interrupts, they are effectively pasted between the callers. Second, the scenes of Helen securing the house are more suspenseful than they have a right to be. This is because — and this is news to just about anyone in Hollywood — it is engrossing to watch someone do something competently on TV. Maybe because we encounter it so infrequently in real life. Whether it is Hannibel Lector, Walter White, or a chef chopping onions, we love to see people who are proficient at their task.
Maybe that’s makes AHP so consistently great.
Other Stuff:
- [1] I always thought this meant a woman who had never married. Apparently it just means currently unmarried and of a certain age. Helen actually refers to her husband Fred who is either dead or hiding.
- AHP Deathwatch: Not surprisingly, no survivors. BTW, Gertrude was born in 1884.
- As usual, bare*bones e-zine got there first and has a lot of great info on the production and source material.
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